The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Computer-based collaborative information sharing systems enable teams of computer users, who may be widely geographically dispersed, to create, update, and manage electronic documents using a federated system. An example system is CONFLUENCE, commercially available from Atlassian of Sydney, Australia. However, users of collaborative information sharing systems also typically use other computer program applications for other purposes; for example, these users may separately interact with an e-mail client program or web-based mail inbox, documents containing personal tasks or work tasks, calendars and other systems. These other applications may generate alerts, notifications or other events that require the attention of the user. Consequently, computer users typically are required to repeatedly change their attention from interacting with the collaborative information sharing system to one or more of the other applications. The result is an excessive amount of mentally disruptive context switching, and inefficiency incurred in switching between applications.
A related issue in this context is that the collaborative information sharing systems typically have been managed separately without awareness of the events that are generated in external systems such as e-mail, task managers or calendars and without a facility to receive or interpret these events.
Users of a collaborative information sharing system also may wish to express approval for a particular comment, document, task or other item that has been created by another user of the system. In the past, expressing approval typically has required the user to enter a new comment or reply comment in the system, which may require more time than the user wishes to spend to express approval.